Been trying to break this game recently. The game looked like it would be fairly easy to speedrun up until today, but then it broke my spirit. Ended up doing a testrun just to see what kind of time I would get. The following's all from the perspective of an unassisted runner, who found absolutely no information about this game anywhere. Personally I hope a tas would find a lot of tricks and optimizations that I didn't, since I only played the game for a couple weeks, but since I didn't find them myself I can't really comment on new sequence breaks ;)
http://dehacked.2y.net/microstorage.php/info/233492517/redzone%20testrun%20v1.gmv Unassisted testrun with lots of rerecords. SDA time is about 2403, if you're curious.
There's lots of skips and stuff in there. Fairly confident the overall route is decent, at least with my level of knowledge. Walking speed (Mirage walks faster than Shades who walks faster than Rocco) and the biggest skips requiring explosives determines who dies where. I implemented every worthwhile skip I know of, even if I'm not sure if I would actually use them in a run (mission 6 power plant, this means you. there has got to be an easier and/or faster way to do this, but hell if I know what. if that area looks bizarre, that's because there's force fields and instant death everywhere).
TAS would probably skip destroying the power plant in stage 1, which saves 8-10s. I don't do that because, as far as I can tell, it's near-impossible for a human to get through the rest of the first four missions without having to land at a repair depot, and that would erase the time gain. Cut it fairly close already -- tail's just one shot away from getting destroyed. Also wish I'd managed hellfires better up through mission 4 (could probably kill one of the 3 turrets at the start of the supply corridor entrance to reduce lag, and they would kill the sub faster), but I didn't feel like restarting. I don't know of any other glaring strategic errors. Aside from the part in mission 8 where I check the map to see where I'm going and then forget to rerecord that out, rofl
tricks that I ended up not using
-Rocco, like Shades, can do a skip in the final mission bunker, but since he can only damage boost himself straight away from a solid object with his rockets (as far as I know), you have to go to the right area, push an oil drum up and left, and then use that to set up the damage boost. Takes way too long. Mirage, as far as I know, has to play the level normally.
-The first computer in mission 3 can be skipped. Shades can do it with a grenade boost, but that's suboptimal since you want to kill someone this mission to save yourself the extremely long walk back, and shades is way faster than anyone else in M10. Any character can do it by pushing an oil drum to the right warhead, jumping off it to the right, and then just holding up to land past the warhead (you'll get time to move up when you're falling from the top-of-oil-drum level to ground level). This is obviously slower than just using the computer though.
-If you skipped the first computer and, for some odd reason, want to not die and walk out, you have to jump back past the warheads (which won't have started moving once you activated the second computer). I think only shades can do it, but I didn't exactly try very hard. Mostly mentioning this because, if you damage boost to the left side, you can use the proximity mine on the floor to do the other boost past the missile, which is kinda cool.
-There's a couple other places in bunkers where you can clip through obstacles with explosives, but they're not worth detailing, as Mirage's faster walking speed tends to be better (M2) or you skip the bunker entirely (M5). Seems that you can boost through most obstacles, but not walls? I've had 0 success wedging myself into a wall.
-The big barred doorway obstacles that you get rid of with det charges or switches seem to be much harder to clip through than other obstacles. Regular obstacles are extremely easy to clip through; go up to them, get damage boosted away while holding forward, then jump.
if you choose to tas this game, good luck. you'll need it.
